Toast: Labor Optimization Is the Highest-Value AI Use Case in Hospitality, Per 38% of Surveyed Pros

A Harri survey cited in Toast’s new restaurant-AI guide found that 38% of hospitality professionals rate labor optimization as AI’s single highest-value application in the industry — more than order accuracy, inventory, or guest communication, the other nine use cases the guide covers. Toast backs the ranking with a live example: Wendy’s FreshAI drive-thru deployment, cited as a real-world case of AI cutting order errors at scale, though most of the guide’s other nine use cases — demand forecasting, staff scheduling, kitchen ticket prioritization, personalized upselling — are described generically rather than through named case studies.

The guide is explicit that Toast IQ, its own conversational AI assistant, is meant to deliver several of these ten capabilities as one platform rather than requiring restaurants to stitch together separate point solutions — a vendor-positioning angle inside otherwise general educational content, and one worth reading with that in mind. It also frames AI as augmenting rather than replacing restaurant workers, a message every hospitality AI vendor is reaching for right now given how sensitive frontline staff are to automation framing.

The scale of what’s actually being spent to own that labor use case in-house, rather than buy it from a vendor, shows up a few days earlier in Aimbridge Hospitality’s launch of LIFT, its second proprietary technology platform of 2026. Rather than adopting a Toast-style bundled tool, Aimbridge built its own labor forecasting and scheduling system, unifying real-time staffing visibility across its hotel portfolio; pilot properties saw their largest productivity gains in housekeeping and laundry, and CIO Keryn McNamara framed the goal as catching “a staffing gap the moment it happens” rather than after the fact.

The two moves — a POS vendor packaging labor AI into an existing platform, one of the largest hotel management companies building the same category from scratch — are the same survey finding playing out at opposite ends of the buy-versus-build decision. Labor optimization isn’t a features checkbox anymore; it’s contested enough ground that operators at Aimbridge’s scale would rather own the model than license one.